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Zombie mode constructive feedback

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Reactorcore, May 16, 2012.

  1. Reactorcore

    Reactorcore Shark Slayer

    Messages:
    155
    Hi

    So I finally decided to buy the a gold account and got the chance to play several hours of zombie fortress multiplayer. Now I'd like to step back and give some extensive feedback based on my experience so far.

    Like always, compliments first:

    The feel of fighting the zombies is fucking great. They can seriously make you scared and panic. When everything is dark and there are too many of them, all banging on your doorstep, wanting to tear you apart, you will know things just got real. The gameplay is absolutely brutal.

    The variety of the different zombie types are very distinct and unique. Combine that variety with some surprising AI, these zombies really pose a serious challenge and wreck your awesome fort if you don't prepare.

    Now to the constructive feedback I promised.


    A battle of unfairness - glitch abuse galore

    The zombies are extremely overpowered and merciless. Normal zombies will break doors very fast, zknights will smash walls like a boss and wraiths will just nuke everything. As anyone playing ZF, you will quick to learn this and the only way you're gonna survive is to play the game on its own terms: being unfair too.

    By this I mean, experienced players will not build castles that could be seen in CTF matches, instead, they will use every glitch and other dubious advantage they can get to survive the odds.

    For example, building underground bases is far more viable than building anything on the surface. Or abusing AI's inability to not being able to climb notched walls, as opposed to solid walls. These are just a few examples of what I mean, but just so you know the current gameplay is pretty much based around abuse one way or another.

    There are two things that fuel this: Utter unfairness of zombies (especially wraiths) and ridiculous spawning mechanics for zombies. You may want to rethink how the ZF game flows and what zombies are capable of and what they cant do.


    No end goal - playing ZF feels pointless in the long run

    At first I had fun learning how the game works, testing out the cool new toys (boulders, kegs, lanterns), discovering the types of enemies and observe how they behave, but after that, when the time came to fight them seriously, the game became pointless to go on.

    Why? Because there is no end. If you want to survive for very long, then you will just abuse the game and sit underground under 7 layers of stone waiting as long as you can before you get bored. Having a clear goal to achieve would fix everything.

    My suggestion would be this:
    To win a round of zombie fortress, the team must destroy all demon altars, and upon doing so defeat the final boss that is summoned upon the destruction of the last demon altar. Killing the final zombie boss monster will result in a victory, and the next map would begin.

    Alternatively, destroying the altars only stops zombie spawns permanently and to win, you must hunt down the remaining zombies. Or maybe combine these two winning conditions.

    Ultimately, anything goes and maybe the winning condition can be even different for each round. The important thing is that there is a way to win it. It will give the motivation to work towards surviving and also put yourself out there to actively fight the zombies and not just sit tight in a huge stone prison.


    Consistency is absent once again - Zombies popping out of thin air

    I remember preaching about consistency long ago, but it seems it got slipped up again. Oh boy.
    The important thing what I said back then was that "its hard to have fun when you cant trust the game your playing". Basically, the game does stupid stuff that makes you say "this is bullshit" out loud.

    Now, KAG has kept changing its universal rules time and time again, but mostly, the basics seem to work ok to a sufficent degree. My focus with the lack of inconsistency is with the Zombies. Particularly how zombies spawn.

    The demon altars are good and it should set an example to how the rest of the spawning works: by having a physical, interactive point of origin.

    The point of this, is that no matter what happens on the map, you as a player will know when it happens and you can actually do something about it, rather stuff coming out of seemingly nowhere and without a warning.

    Also, on the note of inconsistency: why the hell don't spikes affect zombies?


    Heres what I propose:

    Zombie altars are the main goal of the game. They spawn a zombie every now and then that will attempt to climb to you from the underground. The altars are destroyable and that is your task to do as a player; to destroy them in order to rid that particular map from evil forces.

    As long as there is atleast one demon altar left on the map, during night, it will spawn 2 portals at each end of the map on the surface, from where zombies will come pouring in. These portals are made of pure evil energy and the only way to permanently stop them is to destroy the demon altars. When this happens, no more evil portals will appear on the surface at night and you are considered a winner. (Unless you still have to slay that super boss zombie I was talking about earlier.)

    Additionally, underground tunnels may have lesser zombie altars that provide additional points for zombie spawning once a player(s) are close enough to it. As long as a player will remain within a certain proximity of the altar, it will spew a zombie out every now and then, up to a limit of a certain number of how many an individual lesser altar can support at once.



    Thats it for now, hopefully my input was useful and maybe something might seem good enough to implement into the game itself.
     
    dragonarthur, Contrary and Raron like this.
  2. Monsteri

    Monsteri Slower Than Light Tester

    Messages:
    1,916
    Hi there, always good to see topics written by you. :)

    I very much agree with every point you made.
    First thing, zombies are too hard. I don't really have problems with not being an overpowered tank as that would just get boring, but it's damn too hard. If you'll put up a normal fort with a few migrants in it, you won't be able to survive over 3 nights, no matter how well you do. It just leads to frustration in my opinion.

    The skeletons, Wraiths, Gregs and Zknights are the worst problems. I'll go ahead and suggest things to solve some problems without making ZF too easy:

    Skeleton:
    • Hacks through doors way too fastly, one skeleton should take at least a minute to hack through a pair of doors.
    Wraiths:
    • They spawn too often. And in too low levels. I suggest wraiths to only spawn when over 10 zombies get frustrated; Often this would mean that there's someone blocking off the zombies, and wraiths would then blow up the way for those fellow zombies of theirs. Of course they should spawn from the portals too, but stop spawning soon if the player moves away to a certain distance from the portal. (Talking about portals, it would be fuqum cool if you could go into a different realm by entering them, but I guess that's out of sight :P )
    Gregs:
    • Can't kill as an archer. They take no damage from arrows. Generally they're too high health units anyway, when one spawns you can't do anything but hide in your fortress and hope that it won't get in. Two or three charged arrows should kill it.
    Zknights:
    • They're kinda alright, difficulty wise, but a few things make them suck.
      1. No enough animations. They should have animations of falling and jumping. Also some animation presenting when it's somewhat safe to attack them without getting steamrolled. Yeah see below.
      2. There should be a "Window of Opportunity" - time span that you're safe to attack them in. This could be a bomb or keg blowing and doing damage to them, stunning them for 2 seconds. After the stun they could burst an outrage for 1 second, dealing 2 hearts of damage each hit and dashing forward.
    That's about zombie balancing. There really needs to be a winning object, I suggested it someday in IRC and didn't get love, but there really should. Destroying all portals and getting a final boss is a good idea, it would be decently hard to do and a fun exploration mission. After surviving a little longer, the game just becomes meaningless and you'll end up suiciding. The final boss could be a necromaner that summons the zombie mutant monster which Geti posted in IRC a while back.

    The regular zombie spawning is a little more difficult though, they do need to spawn on surface but having portals appear would look rather silly. It could be that necromancer that comes every night and summons some zombies, but that would be heavily abuseable; Big tower to the end of the map, tada. Though the necromancer could have some secret powars, and blow up such towers with one big bang. The main problem with zombies spawning on the sides out of nowhere is that the migrants and spawning players will have trouble coming through.

    Hope someone found this helpful.